Gill in the Morning

But back to the Southern Africa Scholarship, Gill agreed to meet the delegation at 8.30 am. A discouraging time to meet anyone, but moreover one which he knew would not get him into too much trouble, for the bells summoning him would be rung at 8.50. Due to the last minute xeroxing of necessary information the delegation arrived ten minutes late. This was unfortunate and should not have happened, and gave Gill a good excuse to delay things even further. It wasn't enough that we had lost time, we had to lose even more while he continually reminded us of it.

Once questioning started Gill was quick to display that particular inability to grasp more than one idea at a time or respond with reason and civility which marks him out as one of the more intransigent members of Parliament. He was asked, for the record and to establish a basis on which the discussion could proceed, why the Cabinet had introduced the regulation restricting the scholar's speaking rights.

The answer was expected to revolve around the two reasons already made public; that academic study would suffer and that the scholar's safety would be endangered when s/he returned home. But Gill took another tack, essentially the same one he took earlier in the year over the Movick affair. He claimed that the regulation was not new and had been the custom for many years, both in New Zealand and everywhere else in the Commonwealth.